The Chief Trick To Making Good Mistakes

The Task Of The Mind Is To Produce Future, As The Poet Paul Valery Once Put It. A Mind Is Fundamentally An Anticipator, An Expectation-generator. It Mines The Present For Clues, Which It Refines With The Help Of The Materials It Has Saved From The Past, Turning Them Into Anticipations Of The Future. And Then It Acts, Rationally, On The Basis Of Those Hard-won Anticipations.

Philosophers Are Never Quite Sure What They Are Talking About - About What The Issues Really Are - And So Often It Takes Them Rather A Long Time To Recognize That Someone With A Somewhat Different Approach (or Destination, Or Starting Point) Is Making A Contribution.

There's No Polite Way To Say To Somebody (religious Followers) 'do You Realize You've Wasted Your Life?

We Should Get Used To The Idea That We'll Probably Never Be Able To Find - And Confirm - A Good Explanation Of The Ultimate Origin Of The Universe, Though I See No Reason To Believe That We Can't Press Much Further On This Question Than We Have Managed To Date.

The Kindly God Who Lovingly Fashioned Each And Every One Of Us And Sprinkled The Sky With Shining Stars For Our Delight - That God Is, Like Santa Claus, A Myth Of Childhood, Not Anything [that] A Sane, Undeluded Adult Could Literally Believe In. That God Must Either Be Turned Into A Symbol For Something Less Concrete Or Abandoned Altogether.